David Storey - Saville

As the problems increased in complexity and his father’s patience slowly ran out, and as Colin’s own tiredness after a day at school grew more apparent, his mother would begin to complain. Often when he had gone to bed, the problems, still unsolved, racing round his head, he would hear their voices raised in the kitchen, his father saying, ‘Nay, I won’t bother, then. We’ll send him down the pit like all the rest. After all, why should he be different?’

And when he came down in the morning his mother would be saying as soon as his father came in from work, ‘There’s no reason at all why he should go down the pit.’

‘And where else will he go in this place, then?’

‘I don’t know,’ she would say as he clattered about the kitchen, taking off his boots, picking up his red pencil and beginning again with the problems where he had left off the night before, even occasionally bringing out the solution from his waistcoat pocket, written down for him by someone at work. ‘It’s no good forcing him’, she would add, ‘into something he can’t do.’

‘He can do them,’ he would say. ‘The reason he doesn’t do them is because you’re for ever hanging over him.’

‘He can’t do them’, she said, ‘because he’s tired,’ picking up Steven, who invariably cried when they quarrelled, pulling at his mother’s skirt and asking to be lifted.

‘It’s better that he’s tired now than he should have my job and be tired like I am, later.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you should give him time and not press him.’

‘Press him,’ he would say, stamping his stockinged feet and, getting no effect from that, banging his fist on the table so that all the cups and saucers rattled. ‘I’m damned’, he would add, ‘if I’m going to be beat by a decimal point and a couple of fractions.’

In the mornings too when Colin came down his father would look up from his breakfast, the pit dirt still black on his lashes, and say, ‘What’s two point five multiplied by seven? Quick now, in your head,’ gazing at him with his pale-blue eyes, black-rimmed, then glancing quickly down and saying, ‘That’s right,’ when he had answered and adding, ‘How do you spell “geography”? Quick, now. Isn’t it with a “j”?’ shaking his head in frustration if his mother corrected him and saying, ‘I was only testing him out,’ beating the table in rage.

In the end his father was quickly distracted. On the road leading out of the village to the south, past the Institute and the Dell, a field had been divided up into allotments. Each plot of land was twenty or thirty yards square and in the evenings and on Sunday mornings the men would go down there, carrying their spades and forks, to turn over the hard, tufted turf of what had once been a cow pasture. His father had been given a plot close to the road so that as the men came into the field or left he could always call out to them and frequently, having carried the spade down for him, Colin would be left digging on his own while his father sat in the hedge bottom smoking and talking to Mr Stringer or Mr Batty or Mr Shaw. ‘Nay, dig a straight line,’ he would call out and add to the men, ‘The war’ll be ovver afore we’ve grown ought here.’

He bought plants on the way home from work and set them out in neat rows; cabbages with pale-green leaves on yellow stalks, cauliflowers and sprouts. While Colin dug back the grass on one side, turning it over and breaking it up in the earth, his father would rake out the rows, sifting the soil and drawing the stones and larger pieces away. Crouching down at the end of each row he would take out the gaily coloured packets of seed from his waistcoat pocket, tearing off a corner and tapping a few of the seeds into his hand. With his fist clenched he would waft them out on to the soil like a man shaking dice, crouching down or stooping, and covering the seeds up with the edge of his boot as soon as they were scattered. When he had reached the end of the row he would look for a stick, pierce the empty packet, and set it in the ground. In this way he planted carrots and beetroot, while peas and beans he carried in large packets in his coat, sticking his finger in the soil if it was soft and setting one bean or one pea at the bottom of each hole. Finally, when all the seeds were planted, he cut sticks out from the hedge at the end of the allotment and set them over the rows like a net, occasionally breaking off to cross over to where Colin was digging and say, ‘Here, let’s have a go: we’ll be here till midnight,’ digging in the spade and turning over the heavy sods. ‘You’d have thought they’d have ploughed it over for us, for a start. It’s like trying to dig a mountain.’

With the proximity of the Institute many of the men spent their time there, bringing their tools down in the early morning only, once the Institute was open, to disappear up the road, coming back at lunch-time to retrieve their spades or forks or, in the case of Batty’s father, lying down on the grass mounds between the plots to sleep, his mouth wide open, snoring, his arms stretched out at his sides.

‘I don’t mind drinking,’ his father would say. ‘But I don’t go for a man who doesn’t know when he’s had a drop.’ Yet whenever he spoke to Mr Batty he would stand by him, looking up almost shyly at his red face, saying, ‘That’s right, Trevor, lad,’ laughing with his hands held to his side.

His father took a great deal of trouble with the allotment. He paid the same sort of attention to it that he did to his sewing, or to the cooking when his mother was ill. Whenever the milkman’s cart had passed the door and left some manure in the street, he would say, ‘Up you get and let’s have it in,’ and in the evening Colin would carry it in a bucket to the allotment and spread it over the rows, his father wandering off to one of the other plots to talk to Mr Batty or Mr Shaw, and adding, ‘You might pull out a few of those weeds while you’re at it. I don’t know. They come up as soon as you look.’

Though he hadn’t troubled to take a plot himself Mr Reagan often came down on a Sunday or, extending his stroll beyond the Institute, on an evening, carrying the cane which he always affected whenever he intended going beyond the end of the street or the colliery yard and, standing by the hedge in his bowler, leaning on his stick, he would say, ‘No, no, I won’t come in,’ indicating his shoes which were always shiny, and adding, ‘I wouldn’t like to put the old lady to any great trouble cleaning these.’

If he had arrived unobserved he would call over the hedge to his father, laying the leaves aside with his cane, saying, ‘Why, Harry, that’s a fine job you’re making there,’ or, later in the year, when the beetroot had come up in dark clumps above the soil, and the carrots were shining bright orange beneath the ferny leaves, he would call, ‘Why, Harry, that’s a very fine showing you have there,’ adding, if his father took one out of the soil to show him, ‘Why, Harry, I wouldn’t mind having a few of those on the table tomorrow lunch-time,’ shaking his head in surprise whenever his father pulled a few out. ‘Why, Harry, that’s very decent of you. That’s very decent of you, indeed,’ leaning over the hedge to take them or coming to the gap, holding them well away from his suit, by the tip of their leaves, as he walked away.

‘Aye, well, we can’t eat them all ourselves, can we?’ his father would say and invariably would also pull up a few vegetables for Mrs Bletchley next door.

A little while earlier Mr Bletchley had been called up. Unlike the men who worked in the mine his job had no priority and in fact, shortly after he left, from the same station, carrying a little suitcase and with Bletchley on one side and Mrs Bletchley on the other, both crying, a woman in faded blue overalls took over his job of carrying the long pole between the trucks and, after a brief visit home, in uniform, looking strangely tanned and contented, Mr Bletchley wasn’t seen again. The only contact they had with him was through Bletchley himself, who, on the way to school with Reagan, would describe the number of men his father had killed the previous week, the number he had captured, and the extent of the terrain which Mr Bletchley personally had overrun. ‘How many has he killed?’ Batty would ask him and when he’d been told would gaze at Bletchley with a slightly dazed expression, saying, ‘What’s he do it with?’